


stasis

by Anonymous



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Canon Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:15:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29818593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Lately his metaphors had been getting heavy handed.
Relationships: Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten/Qian Kun
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24
Collections: Anonymous





	stasis

**Author's Note:**

> this is just pretentious nonsense, i'm sorry.

He began the day considering the possibility of stillness. Early in the morning they were loaded off to the company building to learn choreography. It was the same every time: the endless repetition, the struggle with the body to force it into movement, the refraction of a thousand mirror images reflected off the walls around him. But it wasn't this stillness Kun was interested in; rather, in the mirror, he could see Ten's eyes, and the way they flicked to his bag every time he heard a phone vibrate. Underneath the soft fall of his black hair, his face was set and motionless in focus; it was only his eyes that jumped. Maybe it was a type of stillness, Kun thought, for something to end up back where it began. A circle, for example, was a point so constantly in motion that it could be said to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The circle was motionless even if the point that created it was not. This was clearly unlike a line, whose clearly defined start and end gave it no such mystery. 

Lately his metaphors had been getting heavy handed. Still, Ten was difficult to fathom, while Kun himself could never be accused of anything except too much honesty. He was too easy to read: he could be followed from point A to point B. 

During a break, Kun asked, "Are you waiting for something?" 

"No," said Ten. Slowly, but his eyes gave him away. 

*

He began the day considering the refraction of light. In school he had been taught that a rainbow in a prism was the refraction of light through glass--that as light passed through one medium through another, it bent, and different colours left the prism at different angles. In other words, the prism took what was whole and separated it. 

Outside the room Kun could hear Ten's voice along with someone else. It took him a moment to place the second man. It was the same man who it always was, Ten's old friend from whom he could not be separated. Ten invited him over to play with the cats every week, although maybe by this point it had stopped being about the cats and started being about something else, or maybe it had never been about the cats at all and the cats had always been the mediating excuse for two people to spend time together.

He stared at the rainbow refracted through the window onto the plain white windowsill and wondered what part of the window had warped such that the rainbow could exist. By definition a prism needed an angle, but from what he could see the glass was smooth. Outside the sky was blue and the sunshine was not buttery or golden but sharp, thin and clear, the kind of impotent light that accompanied these dreary winter months. 

The two voices in the living room rose in laughter, and then a sharp cut off gasp that ended in a giggle. One of the cats was yowling--not in distress, Kun thought, but just for something to say. 

He looked at the rainbow again. The colours were clear and distinct except at their very edges, where they blurred into each other muddily. It was too much, he thought, to say that a prism separated what was whole. It would be just as accurate to say that the prism revealed what already existed to the weak and ineffectual human eye. He watched the rainbow until a cloud pushed across the sun. Just as quickly as it had existed, it disappeared.

*

He began the day trying to explain the movement of bodies in space. A wave is actually a line, he tried to explain to Xiaojun. It pushes backward and forward simultaneously, taking itself forward at the same time as it takes itself back. Xiaojun, who was not given to flights of metaphor, thought this was ridiculous and said so. "Then why would the tide come in?" 

Kun did not have a reply to that. It wasn't really that he thought a wave was a line in space but that he was interested in how the wave seemed to neither push forward nor recede. It occupied a middle ground of existence: even as it was in constant motion, it seemed to go nowhere. Next to him, on the black rocks, Ten was taking a picture on his phone. At first Kun thought it was a photo of the waves, and then Ten held up a peace sign and used his other hand to click a photo of himself.

"Is it for the other two?" Kun asked. He was talking about the two of them who'd gone all the way back to the place of their origin, where now they were in stuck in a moment of inertia. In order to push the group forward, or so the company said, they had to accept the three week isolation period, a time of stagnation, dead air. The separation was not just spatial or physical but mental; although the circumstances could not have been foreseen, or so the company said, the delineation was very clear. They could be pulled apart. But it was not the first time. Maybe it was because of the difference in location that Kun felt it more keenly, this separation. He looked up at the grey sky. Light could refract through water too, but for some reason he thought he would not see any rainbows here.

"No," Ten said. He smiled at the reply he got on his phone. Kun knew it was from that friend. The old familiar feeling of impotence rose up in him and instead of letting it choke his throat he tried to handle it like the waves, let it flow back and forth within his body, in motion but without going anywhere. Then, without warning, a wave reared up and crashed onto the rock where they were standing, drenching all of them from the knees down. The cold water shocked him into stillness, a type of separation, and he welcomed it.

**Author's Note:**

> with apologies to renee gladman for ganking her style--the style of this fic is (loosely) based on _calamities_ , and the idea about the sea in motion is also (very loosely) based on an essay from _calamities_.


End file.
